Tobacco Industry, Conciliatory in U.S., Goes on the Attack in the Third World

By BARRY MEIER

Published: January 18, 1998

Last August, dozens of journalists from Latin America arrived in Miami as guests of the British-American Tobacco Company, whose Brown & Williamson unit makes popular cigarettes like Kool, Carlton and Lucky Strike.

The company paid for the visitors' air fare, hotel rooms and even dinners at expensive restaurants. At meetings like this, the reporters, from countries including Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Peru, heard company officials and paid speakers attack restrictions on smoking and cigarette advertising as scientifically unsound or artifacts of lawsuit-driven societies like the United States'.

The public relations full-court press was a startling contrast to the face of sweet reason that the tobacco industry has been putting on for the American public these days. In June, five major tobacco companies, including multinational giants like British-American Tobacco, based in London, and the Philip Morris Companies, reached a $368.5 billion agreement to settle existing lawsuits by states and smokers, a development hailed by the industry as a historic opportunity to reduce youth smoking. That deal is now under consideration by Congress.

But while the companies agreed to sweeping restrictions in this country on cigarette marketing and secondhand smoke and to bolder cancer-warning labels, they are fighting as hard as ever in the third world to convince the media, the public and policy makers that similar changes are not needed.

The tobacco companies have long lobbied policy makers here and abroad to prevent passage of antitobacco measures. But in the last three years they have sharpened their campaigns overseas to influence how tobacco-related issues are portrayed in the news or presented to the public, and there are signs that some of those efforts are paying off.

For example, British-American Tobacco, which is owned by B.A.T. Industries, has had seminars at luxury resorts worldwide at which it has offered foreign journalists data that play down the health risks of smoking. To head off indoor smoking restrictions, large cigarette producers have also begun public relations campaigns abroad that recycle the same theme. And advertising agencies like Leo Burnett Inc. of Chicago, the creator of the legendary Marlboro Man campaign, have used their talents on behalf of tobacco producers to thwart antismoking programs outside the United States.

In the Philippines, for example, Leo Burnett officials proposed a public relations strategy to Philip Morris in late 1994 aimed at removing ''cancer awareness and prevention'' as a ''key concern'' of health department officials in that country, an internal agency document shows. Though a Leo Burnett spokesman said that Philip Morris did not buy the proposal, agency executives took credit in the document for helping that year to ''neutralize'' the effects of a Philippine Government plan intended to reduce smoking by children. The document also stated that the agency had ''propagated studies that point to other possible causes of lung cancer.''

Some tobacco executives see the proposed settlement in the United States not as a blueprint for a new worldwide approach to cigarettes but solely a concession to legal realities in America.

Under the plan, in exchange for protection from lawsuits, the tobacco companies agreed to finance antismoking campaigns, restrict marketing and pay penalties if youth smoking does not decline, among other things. But the document is virtually silent about the cigarette makers' overseas operations, an area that antismoking advocates want to see addressed in the coming Congressional debate on the proposal.

John Bloom, manager of international issues for the Coalition for Tobacco-Free Kids in Washington, said the proposed settlement did not address issues like whether tobacco producers should be required to acknowledge the harmful nature of their products wherever they do business.

The Congressional debate over the proposed settlement comes as the tobacco industry finds itself under attack in some parts of the world. Recently, 15 European nations, including Britain, France, Germany and Italy, agreed to ban virtually all tobacco advertising within five years. Turkey has recently passed laws that restrict cigarette advertising.

With cigarette sales stagnant in this country, multinational producers like B.A.T., Philip Morris and R. J. Reynolds, which is owned by the RJR Nabisco Holdings Corporation, have scrambled in recent years to buy stakes in production operations in areas of rapid sales growth in Eastern Europe, Asia and elsewhere.

In recent years, for example, British-American Tobacco has put on many conferences for journalists, inviting reporters from third-world countries.

''Their strategy all the time is to raise questions about anti-tobacco research,'' said Kathryn Strachan, a reporter with Business Day, a newspaper in Johannesburg, who attended a company-sponsored conference last year at a resort on Mauritius, an island nation in the Indian Ocean.

Some of the speakers at the B.A.T. conferences were American scientists with strong ties to the tobacco industry. But company officials have also offered newer faces. One of them, Tana Wells, who is described by the tobacco company as an ''independent communications consultant,'' made her presentation to a meeting of African journalists last year from a wheelchair.